Title:  Doing More
Date:  20191227
Tags:  me
========================================

Maybe I needed a few days to wallow and sulk, I took some time off around
Christmas, but I'm back to making progress on my assembler.  It also helps me to
write my thoughts out, which is why I'm here.  And yes, it's another project
reboot, but it feels good this time.

It occurred to me that I started having trouble focusing on my Altair projects
around when I starting allowing myself to write programs in a text editor on my
laptop instead of on paper.  A text editor is nice for correcting typos,
inserting missed lines, and copy/paste.  But for me, it also encouraged writing
larger chunks of code with less testing on the actual Altair.  I was also
avoiding compartmentalizing code in an over zealous effort at optimizing.

The limits of paper really helped to keep things short.  Too short to go much
further than I have, but I lost that manageability.  I was getting lost trying
to get everything down and then being overwhelmed when trying to go back and fix
all the missed details.

I've gone back to simpler times.  I'm breaking the code up into smaller chunks.
I can optimize later if I feel like it's too slow.  I can write a simple test
program that I can plug these small subroutines into for testing.  This way, I
can also build a library of stand-alone subroutines to reuse later.

I started by first reining in the assembler project.  I listed the required
features, unnecessary features, and the nice to have features.  It helped me to
remind myself that this is the first version of the assembler.  I don't need to
solve all the problems at one time, and I can use this simple assembler to build
the next, better version more easily.

So for the last few days, I've been happily scribbling out subroutines that will
become the bits and pieces I can put together for my assembler.  It's nice to be
able to see a complete piece of code and walk through it manually testing inputs
and fixing the problems before spending the time doing data entry on the Altair
itself.  This is what I fell in love with when I first got my Altair Clone.


* I'm not actually scribbling on paper anymore, though.  I have moved a step up
over that situation which I'll write about next time.